We saw so many things on Phase 2–the villages of Zambia, the desolation of Namibia, Zimbabwe–that I never thought I’d see. And we just barely touched Africa. There are so many places we had wanted to stretch our Phase 2 into (Mozambique, we’re coming for you), but time and money were short, so instead we just got a taste of it. By The Numbers Phase 2 lasted right about 2 months, leaving Washington, DC on June 3, 2018, and leaving…
We hated Zanzibar. I’ve thought a lot about how I wanted to construct this blog post and build up to that revelation, but I just don’t want to bury the lede. We didn’t enjoy our time there, and we would not go back, and it’s the only place on our trip so far that we would definitively say we would not go back. So let’s get to Zanzibar, and talk about why we disliked it so much. Getting In We…
After Lusaka, our next stop was Zanzibar. That was the plan, and had been the plan for a while. But flights there were incredibly expensive. I was getting very discouraged while looking for flights back in South Luangwa (you’ll remember that I was fairly on edge about expenses while there…) An interesting answer materialized. For a little more than the cheapest tickets available, Ethiopian Airlines had flights that connected through Addis Ababa. But Ethiopian will let you extend that layover…
After South Luangwa, Erika and I smashed head-long into a wall. We were exhausted, having just made a tear through southern Africa, visiting Johannesburg, Harare, Victoria Falls, Livingstone, and South Luangwa in under two weeks, with three safaris in that time. It was time for a break. So we didn’t see Lusaka. We didn’t go out into Lusaka. We didn’t do anything in Lusaka. All we did was rest, recover, and spend time with Erika’s friend, Lindsey, who we visited…
Since Namibia, we’d been chasing that feeling we’d had from doing the self-drive safari. We wanted awesome camping trucks again, and the ability to chart our own path without taking expensive tours. Originally, we were looking to do something really crazy–get awesome camping trucks in Harare, Zimbabwe, drive/camp our way to Victoria Falls, across the border to Zambia, and loop all the way around to Lusaka, Zambia. However, we couldn’t find any reasonable availability for awesome camping trucks. The ones…
The Zambezi river makes up the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia, and it’s the Zambezi that is pouring over Victoria Falls. The two countries are connected by the beautiful Victoria Falls bridge, which towers over the gorge the Zambezi has carved. You can walk across this bridge between the two countries, and it’s my favorite border crossing ever. As our last post mentioned, you can walk to the Zimbabwe side of the falls from the town of Victoria Falls. The…
Like Johannesburg, Zimbabwe was a place we had no intention of visiting before this trip. In Zimbabwe’s case, it was on account of the political unrest there. However, shortly before we left for Phase 2 of the trip, Erika’s sister’s father-in-law (“I am your father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate”) went to Harare for a few months of work, and was going to be there when we’d be in southern Africa. So, suddenly, we had something of a reason to…
We had no intention of going to Johannesburg. On top of being “just another big city,” we both independently felt like it was one of the more dangerous places we considered going. South Africa in general, to put it lightly, has some issues with crime. “Oh, it’d be the greatest country in the world if it weren’t for all the crime,” a South African we met in Istanbul airport, months later, said to us. He may not be a wrong…
Since we started planning this journey, Cape Town was one of the places we very much wanted to go. But by the time the trip started back in January, visiting Cape Town was looking fairly dicey. They were in the middle of an epic two-year-plus drought, water restrictions were in place, and there was talk of the city completely running out of water by April. Fortunately, enough rains had come and pushed that zero-day date out to 2019 at least,…
The morning dawned on the last full day of our Namibia Travels, with Erika bruised from her sand boarding falls, and Brennan bruised from being thrown repeatedly by his horse. Yeah! Seems like his horse was particularly cranky, and actually threw him twice. I know you’re supposed to “get back up on the horse” and all that, but I’m pretty confident I will never be thrown by a horse twice. Day 9 After a wonderful day of barely being in…
